Anyone curious on this topic should listen go Gruber’s conversation with with Ben Thompson. Ben predicted this downfall 4 years ago!
https://overcast.fm/+B7ND6_CHc
All good things do come to an end. Who knows - perhaps Jony is dried up for new ideas or the relationships were just not conducive to such anymore. We’ll never truly know, will we.
I’m typing this on a iMac keyboard that is just fine for me. I’ve always had trouble with my fat fingers and typing on my iPhone or my iPad, but I do it. I’m using High Sierra on my iMac and have no trouble with it. My only complaint is when iTunes changed to being Cloud-based and I lost a lot of music that has taken me in inordinate amount of time to recover.
On Adam’s recommendation, I bought my grandson a Mac Powerbook last fall for engineering school at Cornell. He’s an ORIE major. He adores it and says it serves every need he could possibly have! No complaints about the keyboard, either. He also loves my old iPhone 6S and his iPad Air II.
We had some pretty amazing products and designs come out of Apple in a very short period of time. That’s not realistic in perpetuity. We cannot constantly be “wowed” - just not possible.
I don’t mind not being “wowed” with constant new improvements, but I do intensely mind Apple having turned Ives loose on Mac software, flouting the Human Interface Guidelines heretofore espoused by Apple, and ripping away from me the productivity of an Apple product I already owned and was using successfully.
I cannot forgive Ive in particular and Apple in general for his/their knowing violations of the human interface guidelines. Turning him loose on Yosemite was a huge blunder and was an unconscionable betrayal of the trust Mac owners placed in Apple products and in Apple’s integrity. We were turned into expendable guinea pigs as our existing equipment was rendered borderline usable.
As I explained above, thousands and thousands or more of Mac users spent more than a year trying to implement workarounds which would enable them to read the screen and do productive work on their Macs without recurring eye fatigue and headaches; and the deluge of complaints on numerous Mac websites did nothing to persuade Apple to reverse the damage for over a year.
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I looked at them. And then I looked at my bank account.
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Over at TechCrunch, Matthew Panzarino has penned a response to all the FUD surrounding Ive’s departure.
It’s a good piece.
I must have missed the iPod with HiFi —but perhaps I’m better off without it. I love the Apple Pencil; I use it constantly with my iPad Pro (10.5 inch) and have it in my hand so often, that I frequently try to use it on my iPhone!
“Ive was largely responsible for the … design flops like the iPod Hi-Fi, round Mac Pro, Magic Mouse 2, and first-generation Apple Pencil”
Yes, love my pencil 1.
The first-generation Apple Pencil works well with the iPad Pro, but it suffers from a couple of huge design flaws, as evidenced by how quickly Apple put out the second-generation. Making it perfectly round ensures that it rolls away whenever it gets a chance, there’s no way it can stay with the iPad Pro easily, plugging it into an iPad with the Lighting jack just looks horrible and is an accident waiting to happen, and the cap is really easily lost. The second-generation Apple Pencil resolves all these flaws, but sadly, only by being dedicated to the new iPad Pro models.
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And upping the price…
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A cockatoo literally chewed one of the key caps off my 2014 MBP keyboard, and the key still works fine. The cap is nowhere to be found but the key still works going on 4 months. Luckily it’s the function key which I’ll note would also be of no use on a new MacBook. Can’t make this stuff up. Maybe I can finally upgrade in 2020. Good thing I don’t use emacs or I’d have to remap my keyboard to SPARCstation (those infernal machines!)
Honestly I’m not sure even after working as a software engineer for 10 years that I ever heard from a colleague of just one or a few keys failing on any other keyboard. It’s not as if keys are bad pixels on LCD screens. I even have generic PS/2 keyboards over 20 years old that still would work perfectly fine if only there were any PS/2 ports to plug them into, that’s what a debacle the butterfly keyboard is. Maybe the IT guys but I never even heard of a keyboard failure that didn’t involve a whole cup of coffee or can of Mountain Dew. Even with the Dew they still tend to work; they just might be a little sticky…
Lenovo laptops even come with numpads to this day! (Not that I’d want one but maybe if you’re a serious Excel jockey.) Bottom line, keyboard is an essential laptop component that can’t just break for no reason. If I wanted a $1500 tablet I would have bought a $1500 tablet.
“What ruined Apple wasn’t growth … They got very greedy. Instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision, which was to make the thing an appliance and get this out there to as many people as possible, they went for profits. They made outlandish profits for about four years… What that cost them was their future. What they should have been doing is making rational profits and going for market share.”
—Steve Jobs, 1995
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When I bought my iMac this year, I chose the extended bluetooth version of the keyboard. I ended up swapping it for a Logitech Craft keyboard, a much better typing experience, the key travel, the scalloped keys, the backlighting, the three bluetooth radios. The Apple one wasn’t bad but there was no pleasure in it.
Many years ago a cookie crumb fell in between two keys while I was biding time in Starbucks. One key flew off (not powered by cockatoo) when I was trying to pry the crumb out with my fingernail, and someone walking by happened to step on it. My MBP was still under Apple Care, and to show how long ago it was, I was able to walk it over to a recently opened nearby Apple Store without having an appointment. After waiting about 15-20 minutes, during which time I was busy trying to concoct a credible b.s. story so they wouldn’t charge me for the fix, I just handed my MBP over to the Genius who immediately walked to the back and returned a minute or two later with a new key, no questions asked.
Trying to get something fixed at an Apple Store in NY City metro area now is like entering the ninth circle of hell, and you have to wait practically forever for an appointment and check availabilities at bunch of Stores to scope out the shortest of all the unconscionable waits. But wherever you are, it might be worth contacting Apple to see if they can sell you a key or ship it, and this way you don’t have to deal with the current crop of not very intelligent Geniuses who don’t know very much about fixing anything, especially Macs.
I was going to say I had my entire case replaced because of faded keys on my 2015 MBP Retina (which I should have had done on my 2008 unibody), but I think the case replacement was due to the little foot that fell off.
And it WAS the ninth circle of hell since they sent it back to Apple for the repair! It was back to me much sooner than they said, but still nerve-wracking for 3 keys and a foot - those are things that should be easily replaceable.
Diane
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Back in the days of old when Apple’s Genius knights were bold, the Stores were always well stocked with replacement parts for just about everything, and just about everything was done in store. Granted, this was in the past, and iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Watch, Air Pods, most likely makes stocking more challenging. But excellent, speedy support and services, along with knowledgable Geniuses, in Apple Stores was always a big selling point and competitive advantage. For the moment, they still are, but Samsung has been testing Apple Store knockoffs, and the one in NYC does phone and tablet repair:
https://www.samsung.com/us/837/
I suspect that the departure of Jony Ive might have been influenced by the recent butterfly keyboard and $10-17k Watch disasters, and he did also work with Angela Ahrendts on Apple Stores. He should have increased space for repairs and service, maybe sectioning of an area so people standing around with iMacs won’t have people elbowing through crowds tripping over them. Maybe he was too busy with the Apple Park redesign?
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It warms my heart whenever someone complains about Apple’s design decisions that affect actual usability. 
As a designer, I find it remarkable how Apple went from thoughtful, well-researched, and thoroughly detailed, Human Interface Guidelines (the 1992 printed edition of the Mac HIG is one of my most prized material possessions) whose application was evident across the (then-Classic) Mac OS to so-vague-they’re-almost-useless suggestions that pale in comparison to the what Google has put into creating and documenting their Material Design approach.
Compare this to this video which, at the core, is almost all about aesthetics and hardly related to interactions and usability. It’s ironic that it’s Federighi who addresses the functional side of things, which, of course, should be the very focus of the designer.
But this, of course, is exactly what you get if you put someone in charge of interaction design whose focus is on making things “thinner and lighter” — metrics that simply make no sense at all in the context of human-computer interfaces.
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